That makes my hurtful
because I love WordPress.
And WordPress is not just an opensource project that we believe in,
but it's a social movement where mostof us who use this believe in the
power of democratizing publishingand own our own to have too close.
So I very much love thisproject and love to see the more
people are getting involved.
So, so glad you guys are all here.
I, I thought we were gonnabe looking right on time.
We can probably, are we good?
No.
One more minute.
Okay.
It's recording.
It's good.
Hopefully we have audio and everything,but we should be good to go at this point.
Okay.
We think well, we can get startedas good as it's fingers crossed.
I mean, it says record time will tell.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, welcome everybody, and I hopeyou have lots of energy today and
everyone's going to all the things.
Tomorrow night, the after party, youweren't going, nobody's getting out.
And I say that because I needso many people go to work.
They don't go to the after party.
And if I look like I'm commendingyou, I'm So everyone's going right.
We are home.
Okay.
So, but we're gonna go aheadand get started because
Robert looks like he's ready.
So first up on thedocket is Robert Jacoby.
I call him Jacobs.
Most people call him Jacobi.
I will say with an I. Yes.
Jacobi with
an I.
Yes.
Not to be confused with that other word.
Press Jacobi.
That's right jj.
The, I always say John Ship.
He's John.
Jacob.
Jacob, I think.
Anyway.
John, Jacob, I'm so sorry.
Off topic.
Okay, so we're gonna get startedofficially everyone, let's get excited
for word camera clap and stuff.
Okay.
So, um, I'm gonna do a formal intro.
Oh, okay.
This is gonna be interesting 'cause Idon't think of Robert in a formal way.
That's not a bad thing.
Okay.
Okay, so Robert Jacoby ran threeand a half percent of the internet.
I dunno why I'm laughing.
Okay.
Today's Chief ExperienceOfficer for Black Wall.
Robert connects black wallsecurity message and solutions with
partners, customers, investors,as well as the greater security
open source and online industries.
With 20 years of experience intwo successful acquisitions.
Robert focuses on strategy and marketingas director of WordPress Cloud Ways.
Uh, he was instrumental in350 million acquisitions of
Cloud Ways by Digital Ocean.
You obviously juststarted reading this one.
I did.
I don't ever read it ahead of time.
Because, because then you guys getto see my reaction in real life.
Okay?
Additionally, he is an internationaland respected speaker and has served
and serves in multiple industryand open source roles, including
president, open source matters,making WordPress, posting ican, and
Internet Infrastructure Coalition.
Robert loves his two four legged family.
As well as preparingfor all sorts of meals.
Ask him about it in his annual mar year.
Weekend Ice can test, eatgardens, eat pickles, things, but
everyone give it up for Robert.
Thank you very much for telling.
That is completelyrehearsed and on the spot.
Yes.
The 3.5% is when I was actually runningthe Jumo project and I was open source cms
that some of you may remember I've heardof that was a lot smaller these days.
So, um, I'm gonna try this.
Hold mic.
We'll see this, uh,little gameplay occurs.
So it's, uh, invisible CMS and it'scalled the Return because the presentation
I have not done in over four or fiveyears, give or take, and I thought
it'd be interesting to come back to it.
I ran an agency for over 15 years.
I a lot of that sort of growing painsof going with, uh, what small person
in the company was willing to actually.
Uh, working with enterprise companies,the pharmaceutical space management
space, Microsoft, our agency base.
And we did it on basically, and thenwe stopped using lemme company because
that's what happens when we pressit's came, which is not a bad thing.
Uh, so this is the return.
And, uh, I run through, I actuallytook a couple of slides from back in
the day just to see how some of thenumbers have changed and let's dive in.
Uh, Raquel's already done awonderful introduction of me.
So that's pretty simple.
That's my email.
I actually normally putmy phone number on there.
It's not on there.
If you want my phone number, I'llgive it to you all and to the camera.
So let's start with the agency problem.
How many people here areWordPress developers?
Oh, yeah.
How many people, uh, becameWordPress, uh, started their
agencies or so entrepreneurship orentrepreneurship because of WordPress?
Oh wow, that is pleasantlysmall than I anticipated.
Now you're gonna screw upthe whole, uh, presentation.
A lot of folks, uh, come across a,you know, WordPress and start agency
and, you know, why would you do that?
Let's start an agency.
How many people actually do havetheir agencies or, you know, or
work within an agency?
Maybe that's even a better question.
Uh, so that covers most of it.
I love that you all raise your hands.
In Europe, it's so hard toget audience participation.
Perfect.
So why don't we start agency?
So this is a 4-year-old slide.
We all use WordPress ofall sites on the internet.
WordPress was 41 pluspercent again four years ago.
And, you know, workingwith an agency, great idea.
Let's you know, let's useWordPress, WordPress agency,
uh, WordPress sites at that time.
We're getting 1.6 million.
That's today tribute today, probably1.6 million, uh, unique visitors a day.
Uh, not for modified,uh, apologies for that.
And the average developer incomeat that time and four ish years
ago was about 53, uh thousand.
Us.
Let's jump into the future.
They don't wanna go through some numbers.
But unique list search comeout that stayed same per day.
That stayed same for quality purposes,but now WordPress runs an additional
2% of the entire global internet.
And the average developer salariesactually jumped significantly through
53 to 68 in the us uh, per year average.
I mean, there's all sorts of things,but kind of looking at North American
averages that's around that, uh, range.
Uh, so this is a great idea.
Why would you not want tobe a work press developer?
No brainer.
As we put fly slides hyped upon coffee, crazy introduction
and spun a game, I said that it's,
so we gotta use WordPress.
That's 43% of the internet.
All this traffic average developer income.
This is a great idea.
Let's all become WordPress developers.
Um, so, so that the next question isgonna be, how many of you actually
want to talk with customers?
Say, Hey, I'm a WordPress developer.
Yeah, let's see everyone else, they'regonna, same the exact same thing.
So that's, that's sort of the problem.
And you know, we need to thinkabout how we can fix that, uh,
from the doula agency days.
We actually had no left to stand onbecause no even knew what Jua was.
Excuse me.
So, you know, we're like,we're DTV open source.
We use content managementsystem, it's called jua.
And customers would just be like,
no idea what you're talking about.
What is it?
Nonsense.
We can't spell ju.
So sometimes is that outside?
So we started, uh, at the agency goingthrough kind of a list of things, uh, to
just know, see where our gaps are, uh, youknow, what, you know, how can we fix those
gaps, you know, what are those places?
And so sort of from a like aday to day perspective, we ask
ourselves, you know, questionslike, do we do the front type level?
Are we good designers?
Do we understand the processesand needs and can have those
communications with our clients?
Uh, are we backend, folk?
Are we integrating with otherAPIs, doing custom databases,
working on those kinds of tools?
Uh, design.
So I do separate design frontend.
So content would be the CSSactual work and JavaScript of
implementary design content.
Uh, are we going to actually helpyou build content, uh, drive that
conversation, figure pain points, how weslowly move into SEO, which is a specific
one there as well, and project management.
So these are the things like,you know, which of these
things do we actually do well?
Uh, which of these things dowe actually enjoy doing now?
Because that's also part ofwhat helps you do things well
hate to do.
So I like to throw in projectmanagement, all these slides.
Mm-hmm.
Because something I love agencyhated doing project management.
It was just the kind of.
No pun intended, task based workthat, uh, you know, we just have
brings to discipline around that.
Uh, you hate to do maintenance support.
You may also love to do these things,but then picking out examples to like
go to folks to, uh, think about thiscoding pictures, design words, content.
What did they do?
And then there's sort of the have to do.
So you can like something andhate something, but your customer
will still expect this to be inplace in some way, shape or form.
So this place, in this case, we'rekind of looking at, um, as what
is our horizontal paper note?
So the.
You're gonna have, havesome kind of SE request.
You're gonna worry about performance,security, uh, design, uh, accessibility,
which throwing down that, uh, into theslides years ago was some kind of like new
crazy thing to talk about accessibility.
But now it's more and more expectedbecause it's also, uh, a legal
requirement, uh, definitely in the USI assume Canada has a very similar,
uh, set of regulations around that.
And then you do have todo project management.
'cause if you don't, you'llnever know where you are, where
you're headed, and how much moneyyou've lost on that project.
Because until you start doing real projectmanagement and your client's accountable,
you will lose a lot of money all the timetrying to be your customer's best friend.
Oh yeah.
We just go that problem, that's scope.
What's scope?
Project management, execute.
Uh, so then, you know, we went throughour set of questions in terms what, you
know, what can you really do well and.
Can we ask ourselves these questions?
And this is what I hope all of you folksgo away with is asking these questions.
You know, we really do backend work.
We're working with APIs, uh,custom code, custom iterations,
uh, uh, specifically for e-commercecompanies and more so real estate.
'cause we just happened to geta real estate client right away.
That was large enough that forcedus to learn a lot of things and we
kind of accidentally became experts.
And basic specific, uh, nicheof the real estate market.
So real estate investment trusts.
That's really separated us from anykinds of conversation with other
agencies because that is just tooweird for most agencies to be like,
yeah, we totally know how to handlethe real estate investment trust.
We know the regulatory issues around that.
We know what to expect for contentand what to present to, uh,
partners and investors really reads.
Our Ts are primarily investmentvehicles, so you have to talk to
lot of investors online, talk.
Um, let's look at fixingit a lot a bit more.
And this is where going through thethings you hate to do is critical because
we wanna talk about partnerships andpartners are key to solving a lot of
these problems when you start goingthrough your horizontal or coalition.
Um,
find out if your partners or createtheir own partner program system.
So what does that entail?
That entails understanding the needsyou have, uh, proactively looking
for folks that can fill in thosespaces and folks can also be things.
So what tools might beout there that you need?
Uh, how can you build a relationshipwith that specific tool?
So for example, you're using Gravity for.
Reach out directly to GravityForms, talk to the, uh, product
managers at Gravity Forms.
Uh, connect with them at post statusor LinkedIn or all those things.
Get ahold of, say We exclusively use,there's guys ready to exclusively, uh,
for our forms for all of our customers.
We want to exclusively use Ready Forms.
How can you help supportus in that endeavor?
Technically, are the marketingdevelopment funds that you can.
Uh, help me, you know, advertiseor support my business.
Uh, MDF they're often I refer to, so alot of, uh, product producer, solution
buyers will have marketing developmentfunds, uh, to help grow my business.
'cause every time my business grows,I want to use some of your solutions
and that'll help your business grows.
There's look for those kinds ofrelationships where they may be missing,
uh, both on, you know, the peopleaspect and the technology aspect.
On the people's side, contracting'sbecome easier and easier, uh,
over the last five years for sure.
COVID, uh, forces all to becomeindependent contractors at one point
or another, and we all know how to, uh,work remotely now, which at the time is
also not as comfortable for everyone.
So being able to find theright people is also great.
Finding a designer doesn'thave to be a full agency.
We work with a specific agency.
We have partnership and it'sspecific, specific agency.
Um, and they get buy.
I mentioned, uh, marketing development.